The Thieves of Manhattan (25 page)

A lifetime ago, I could have used that phone to call someone who lived nearby and who might have helped me—my dad or some of his colleagues at the university, my high school buddies from our little writing club, our next-door neighbors, who watched our house whenever I had to stay overnight at the hospital with my dad. But tonight, my home state was every bit as strange and desolate as the others through which we had already passed.

As a teenager in Indiana, I had read and reread
On the Road, The Subterraneans
, and
The Dharma Bums
and fantasized about kerouacking my way across America, getting onto the highway and seeking the promise of the undiscovered country. But now my life had become the opposite of a road novel—the end of my odyssey loomed before me not as a promise but as a threat.

Along our route, I paid for everything with my credit cards, hoping to create some trail. Maybe if this ordeal lasted a month, American Express or MasterCard would send some bounty hunter after me. I bought gas for Iola’s Opel at Texacos, meals at McDonald’s and Ponderosa—my companions never offered to pay and never let me out of their sight. Iola pumped the gas, Norbert always stood behind me on line for food, took the urinal next to mine in the john. And when I was too bleary to drive anymore and I turned off I-70 and paid for a night in a Red Roof Inn, Iola and Norbert insisted that we share a room, a smoker’s double with a radiator that exhaled heat that smelled like a locker room. There, Iola slept on a proust in front of the door, Norbert on one against the locked windows, while I took the
floor between them, wondering when someone might find me and how, wondering if I would ever be able to sleep at all, then waking up to find that the night had passed far too quickly, and that it was time to get back in the car.

Across the Missouri-Kansas border, I began driving slower and made more frequent stops. I kept hoping Iola and Norbert would falter, let me out of their sight, make the mistake of trusting me. Just one slip, and I could run. By now, I had regained more of my strength, but I also found myself again succumbing to one of my worst tendencies—distrusting people at a distance while sympathizing with them up close. Even with a canino pointed at me, even with my shoulders still aching and my palms sweating as I gripped the steering wheel, I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for Iola and Norbert, hoodwinked by a con to which I was already wise.

Past Topeka, the sun began to dip before us. I could now identify each of the parts of my body that did and did not feel pain. My back was still sore, my wrists and ankles, too. But my legs and arms felt stronger. We were driving along Route 177 when the sun finally disappeared beneath the horizon, and signs began to appear ahead for Lake Eureka, Climax, and Manhattan. Iola reached over, flicked the turn signal, tugged at the steering wheel, and pulled a hard right to exit the highway.

Iola Jaffe had scanned every reference volume and anthology that Norbert had handed to her in the Opel, but she still seemed
no closer to finding
The Tale of Genji
. Now, as we stood outside the car, she held her book of maps. Norbert held his gun. In a back pocket, I carried a flashlight Iola had given me, and in my right hand, I held the shovel that had been lying in the trunk. The shovel had a rusted metal blade and a thick, dark green handle. Our car was parked at the side of the two-lane road, and we were now walking alongside it underneath the darkening skies. Our footsteps crunched frozen grass as we passed old silos and barns. Desolate soybean fields were easy to find; not so, a golden cross.

I walked slowly, pretending to limp, and used the shovel as a cane even though I was fairly sure I could run now. But I couldn’t see anywhere to run to; there were no cars on the road, and only the occasional truck passing some distance away on Route 177. I knew that route number was the Dewey code assigned to books about social ethics, but if there was a joke or clue in there, I wasn’t getting it.

Iola studied her map, then pivoted sharply to the right and began to walk away from the road and onto a vast, snowy field. The night was dark and blue; the half-moon and the halo around it were becoming more distinct. The winds were beginning to pick up. I kept one hand in my pocket, the other on my shovel-cane, my eyes focused on Iola Jaffe’s shoes. Norbert stopped to light a vonnegut, throw down a match, and take a drag, but he was still holding his gun and was far too close for me to consider running.

Iola was no longer muttering or soliloquizing. She walked faster over the white field. Still no crosses in sight, golden or otherwise—only snow, dead crops, grass. Soon we were walking
in single file—Iola in front, Norbert behind, me in between—moving almost in unison.

With the flashlight, I kept sweeping the barren landscape in search of a road with a police car to flag down, a trucker to befriend, a charming old farmhouse where I could hide. Nothing. No sounds save for wind, footsteps, breaths, and, once, a lonely saramago dog howling far away.

Venus and Jupiter had become visible overhead when I began to discern something white and glowing way off in the distance. And as we continued to walk, that bright whiteness began to resolve itself into individual balls and beams of light shining down upon something enormous, enough light for a stadium.

The faster Norbert and I walked, trying to keep pace with Iola, who had seen the light and was now running toward it, the clearer the image became. The balls of light became blindingly bright bulbs illuminating low, boxy brick buildings and a parking lot. We seemed to be approaching a shopping mall or a highway rest stop, but I couldn’t say for sure because, when we finally stopped, we were standing behind whatever it was, and I could see only light brown bricks, slate-colored doors, and a half-dozen snow-covered stone steps that led down to black dumpsters. Iola was no longer consulting her map. Gesturing to the building, she gleefully exclaimed, “We’re going in there, lads!” Then she led the way around to the front.

Probably some time in the past, this too had been an empty field, certainly when Iola Jaffe’s book of maps had been published, maybe even when Jed and Faye had hatched their plan. Maybe there had even been a golden cross here, whole fields of them. Tonight, though, this was a shopping mall.

On our drive, we had passed scads of malls just like this one, each with their chain fast-food and sit-down restaurants, electronics and clothing stores, and cineplexes. The only difference was that this one was empty—no cars in the parking lot, not even a single security vehicle. The lot was awash in light, but the stores themselves looked dark inside. The numbers 1 through 12 were visible on the cineplex marquee, but there were blank spaces where titles ought to have been.

To our right was a shuttered Best Buy; across a service road, a dark Potbelly Deli Sandwich Works; and before us was the entrance to 3B: Big Box Books. The company had gone into receivership, and the two other big chains were vying to take it over; this particular 3B was going or had already gone out of business. In front of the locked doors were shelves of remaindered hardcovers—travel guides, children’s story collections, an atlas of the moon. Anyone could have taken the books, but no one else was here. Snow had flecked onto the frozen book spines.

The doors were locked, but Norbert jimmied them open with the sharp blade of the jackknife he took out of a pants pocket. A sign in the vestibule read
NO SMOKING
, but Norbert lit
another vonnegut anyway, and threw down his match. The red light on the security camera above wasn’t flashing; no alarm sounded when we entered the store.

Flashlight in one hand, I pointed out a path over the speckled gray carpet and down the main aisle as I limped along with the shovel. The store was indistinguishable from every other 3B in which I’d attended author readings then departed halfway through in a dark, envious mood, flipped through magazines and books without ever considering buying them, or wandered about, grousing that my work was still unpublished while this joker’s was on sale for $24.95. The café and magazines were up front; the music section was in back; the nonfiction books were up and to the left, the fiction up and to the right. An information kiosk at the back of the main aisle had a computer monitor flashing the 3B logo.

As we walked, I swept the flashlight over the front sale tables, picking out books: stacks of Blade Markham paperbacks—“Soon to be a major motion picture.” On the bestseller table was
We Never Talked About Ceauşescu;
Jens Von Bretzel’s
Counter Life
was on the
BUY TWO GET ONE FREE
grab table. I wondered where
The Thieves of Manhattan
would wind up, then decided it wouldn’t matter much; Norbert could tell me where all this store’s merchandise was headed—out of circulation, then off to the pulping mill.

I began approaching the aisles on the right when Iola said, “Give me that damn torch,” then snatched the flashlight from me. She pointed it directly in front of her as she stepped purposefully to the fiction shelves, passing the beam of light over one row of books and then the next, muttering with what sounded like anticipation.

From what I could see in the illumination provided by her flashlight, she was continuing to seek out books with crosses in their titles, poems with references to bleak or desolate fields. She found the complete works of G. K. Chesterton, which included the short story “A Golden Cross,” and a collection of poetry containing William Carlos Williams’s “A Desolate Field,” but nothing seemed unusual about those books. She kept looking.

Norbert grabbed hold of a sleeve of my gogol and led me away from Iola, pulling me across the aisle to Nonfiction. “This
wigh,”
he said, for an idea seemed to have occurred to him.

“Wot useta be your name was again?” he asked.

“Ian Minot,” I said.

Not the answer he was looking for; he shoved his canino against my chest. “Wot useta be the name of the man you said you wasn’t?”

“The man who I told you wrote the book?” I asked. “Roth. Jed Roth.”

Norbert shuddered, then shook off his disgust and nodded. He led me onward fast, a fierce and purposeful expression on his face. When we got to the nonfiction shelves, he pressed his canino against my back; with his other hand, he dragged on a vonnegut. Then he put the vonnegut between his lips and struck a match to light up the books on the shelves in front of us. I wanted to ask what he could possibly be looking for, but the more attention he paid to the books, the less he paid to me, and the better chance I might have to run.

Across the main aisle, Iola was walking back and forth, holding the flashlight steady, as if painting a long wall with it. She muttered aloud names of authors and titles of books that she apparently could see in the beam of light. It sounded as if she
were casting some spell: “Ambler, Borges, Calvino”; “Chandler, Christie, Conan Doyle.” Every time she said an author’s name, Norbert’s eyes flickered in recognition, but I could sense Iola’s frustration growing—all this time, all these years; still she had nothing—all these clues for a mystery that she still couldn’t solve.

When Norbert and I reached the reference section, I began muttering aloud book titles and author names too. I pulled down books and pretended to study them as if they might hold some secret, but Norbert seemed to understand I was faking it and knocked down whatever book I was holding with the nose of his gun. Maybe he’d take his eyes off me, I thought; if I could run away fast enough, he’d have a hard time finding me in the store. I started looking for a particularly heavy and thick book, one I could bring down hard on Norbert’s skull.

In the light of one of Norbert’s matches, I could see a copy of
Books in Print
on a low shelf—that book looked like it could inflict some serious harm, I thought. But before I could reach for it, Norbert grabbed the book and grinned. “There’s the bloke,” he said. He tossed down his vonnegut, then dragged me toward the information kiosk, where he began roughly flipping through the book in the glow of the 3B computer monitor.

When he got to the R’s, Norbert stopped flipping. And then his eyes lit up again, even more so than they did when he had filled in the last word of a puzzle, when Iola mentioned the name of an author he seemed to recall, or when he was beating me with his gun. He shoved me toward the literary anthologies section, where Iola was already standing, passing her flashlight over book spines. Norbert reached down and grabbed a slender volume, a collection of contemporary adventure stories. The
title was printed in white type on a black background:
Unknown Tales
. I remembered that title; it was one of the few anthologies to which Jed Roth had contributed before he had given up writing.

Norbert handed the book to Iola and looked at her, seeking approval. And when Iola turned to the table of contents, her lips formed a small, craggy cheshire. She thrust the flashlight into my hands, then turned to a story near the back of the book: “‘A Desolate Field, Beneath a Golden Cross,’ a short story by Jed Roth.” There was a biography of the author at the bottom of the first page: “Jed Roth is an editorial assistant in Manhattan, where he is also working on his first novel,
A Thief in Manhattan.”

I was just beginning to try to figure out how this book had gotten here, when Iola shouted “Eureka!” A slip of paper had been folded into quarters and inserted between the pages of Roth’s story. Iola removed the folded sheet, then handed me the book, which I stuffed into a pocket of my gogol.

“Wot
that is?” Norbert asked, squinting at the paper Iola was holding.

Iola patted Norbert on the shoulder. “The stuff dreams are fucking made of, Norbert,” she said. “A treasure map.”

Jed Roth told me he had always liked treasure maps; he put one in just about every story he wrote, said that all good adventures should have at least one, preferably yellowed and blackened
with burn marks, with generous use of the word
ye
, and evocative place-names, such as Dead Man’s Cove, the Sea of Serenity, or Smuggler’s Lair. He liked terrifying warnings marked with skulls and crossbones—Here Be Dragons.